


Situational Awareness

by MachaSWicket



Series: Waypoints [2]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 20:05:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1239151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MachaSWicket/pseuds/MachaSWicket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SUMMARY:   <i>Situational Awareness</i>: knowing where your airplane is relative to its envelope, adversaries, friendlies, and the ground. </p><p>SPOILER WARNING:  This story, like "Directional Stability," is essentially based on a SPOILER for the movie that is NOT in the trailers or any publicly released materials. Please DO NOT READ if you are avoiding spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Situational Awareness

**Author's Note:**

> THANKS: to katelinnea, as ever. :)
> 
> Huge thanks to [lilamadison11](http://lilamadison11.tumblr.com/) for the gorgeous art!

She probably shouldn't have a dog.

Dogs -- especially shelter rescue dogs -- require a lot of time and attention and patience. And while she would love to give Rosie all the attention and patience she needed, the one thing Veronica definitely did _not_ have enough of was time. Because of her ridiculously long hours at the firm, Veronica's dogsitter spent more time with Rosie than she did. 

It was probably a bad financial decision, too, but _not_ having a bundle of excitement greeting her at the door when she stumbled home at eight or nine each night? That would be worse.

Veronica slipped inside her apartment and dropped her bag as Rosie stood up on her hind legs and offered lots of wet kisses. “Who's a good girl?” Veronica crooned, scratching the dog's unevenly cropped ears. “I know, I know,” she laughed, lifting her chin to avoid more slobber. “Sit, Rosie.”

Rosie obeyed, but her butt wiggled on the floor because she was wagging her tail so hard.

Veronica was tired, which was mostly always the case. She shrugged out of her suit jacket, wishing she had time to grab something substantial to eat. She wanted a drink. And a _drink_. But daylight was nearly gone and Rosie needed a walk, and what Rosie wanted, she almost always got.

Sometimes, Veronica wished her dad lived closer, because he'd trained Backup flawlessly and without ever caving into his adorable face. Veronica knew what she was _supposed_ to be doing with Rosie, but then Rosie would look at her with those big, brown, soulful eyes, give her that pit bull smile and, well, Wallace was right -- she _was_ kind of a marshmallow.

Veronica grabbed the leash and snapped it onto Rosie's collar. “All right, all right.” She kicked off her staid, firm-appropriate black shoes with a happy sigh, and stepped into her comfy, brown leather ankle boots. Probably wasn't the most fashionable choice when paired with her drab olive pencil skirt and boring white blouse, but she didn't have the heart to make Rosie wait while she searched for a t-shirt and shorts. Veronica dug in her commuting bag until she found the small wristlet with her phone in it. She snagged her keys off the small table, and opened the door.

“Let's go, my sweet girl.” Rosie popped up and followed Veronica, nearly bouncing down the hall to the bank of elevators. When she started to tug at the leash, Veronica stopped. “No,” she corrected. Spending so long in the shelter had left Rosie with some bad manners, but she responded promptly, moving back to Veronica's side and looking up at her with those gorgeous eyes. “Good girl.” 

When they emerged from the air-conditioned lobby out onto the sidewalk, Veronica groaned. Ugh -- no matter how many years she'd been in New York, she had never managed to adjust to the sticky, humid disgustingness of this version of summer. “My kingdom for a smoggy 75 degree day,” she muttered, leading Rosie three blocks down to the park beside the river. They passed a few joggers, and Veronica felt overheated just watching them. 

The phone in her wristlet buzzed. Veronica groaned and switched hands with the leash to fish it out. “Oh, thank God,” she said when she saw Wallace's face grinning up at her. She was _sure_ it was going to be her boss with questions about responsive documents to discovery requests in the Fitzgerald case. “Yay,” she said into the phone, “it's my BFF!”

Wallace laughed. “Don't even try it -- you didn't call me back last night.”

Crap. She'd _meant_ to, but after work, then the Nets game, then getting back to her place _from_ the Nets game, then a quick walk for Rosie, well, it was all she could do to collapse into bed and hope for six hours of sleep.

Most days, she wanted to _kill_ her 22-year-old self for thinking law school was a good idea.

“I'm sorry,” she apologized. “I think I fell asleep trying to dial my phone.”

“You need a vacation.”

Veronica groaned. She didn't disagree, but they'd had this conversation a thousand times, and she'd made this really uncomfortable, sleep-deprived bed, and she would lie in it, and also defend it from slander. “Did I mention the Nets game?” she asked, instead of arguing. “I'm pretty sure Allen Iverson _dripped sweat_ on me once. Which is actually pretty gross.”

“ _Any_ way,” Wallace said to change the subject. “I had a strange day yesterday and you're gonna wanna hear about it.”

“Oh, _please_ , will you describe the _exact_ tricks that the planes did?” Veronica mock-begged. “It'll be just like that time you dragged me to that airshow in--”

“They're not _tricks_ ,” he interrupted. “They're demonstrations of the incredible capabilities of military aircraft. Aircraft, I might add, that I helped _design_.”

Damn, she missed Wallace. She had friends in New York, of course, but nobody who just _got_ her the way Wallace did. “Yes, Wallace,” she teased. “You build the kickass-iest fighter planes.”

He snorted. “I do. But that's not actually why I called. Well, it's _related_ to why, but--”

“Wallace.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I should probably just -- I bumped into Logan.”

Veronica froze, right in the middle of the path, because that was just about the _last_ thing she expected Wallace to say. Rosie jerked to a halt when the leash went taut, turned her head, and gave Veronica a baleful look. “You what? You mean m--” She stopped herself from saying _my Logan_. “You saw _Logan_ Logan?” she finished lamely.

Wallace chuckled. “You know, a lot of guys named Logan?”

“Well, no,” she spluttered. “Logan was in _Seattle_?”

“Hey,” Wallace protested. “What does that mean?” He'd grown really attached to the Pacific northwest, but Veronica was pretty sure most of that was because he was working his dream job. 

“No,” she backpedaled. “Just -- can people surf in Seattle?”

Wallace sounded amused when he answered. “He was actually here for work.”

Something about the tone of Wallace's voice made Veronica very nervous. But she didn't have the excess RAM to deal with that, because-- “For _work_?” Rosie stopped walking and looked up at her, head tilted in a question. “Logan has a job? Logan _Echolls_?”

A man jogging past flashed Veronica a strange look, and she realized she was speaking way too loudly. She gave Rosie a quick, reassuring scratch on the head. 

“I think,” Wallace paused. “It's more like he has a career.”

Veronica veered off the path and headed for a bench overlooking the East River, ignoring the puzzled look from Rosie. “Okay, now I know this is some kind of--”

“He's a pilot,” Wallace explained. “In the Navy. He flies fighter planes.”

Veronica dropped onto the bench. Because... what? Rosie stood next to her leg, staring up at her. Veronica shook her head. “No.” He couldn't possibly be serious.

“Yes,” Wallace answered, and she could hear the amusement in his voice. “He flew one of my Growlers.”

Veronica knew Wallace. She knew him well enough to know just by the tone of his voice whether he was lying, or joking, or dead serious. So she _knew_ he was telling her the absolute truth, but that didn't mean it made any sense to her at all. “I can't...” She couldn't even formulate a sentence about how much she _just couldn't_.

“Believe me, I was there yesterday,” Wallace said. “And I saw him in his damn flight suit.”

Veronica felt oddly flushed. Damn New York summers. “Flight suit?” she echoed weakly, fighting the sudden urge to fan herself like some fainting Victorian fussbucket. 

“Oh, God, not you too,” Wallace groaned. “You know how much of this crap I had to hear all day from Noelle? What is it with girls and fighter pilots?”

“Fighter pilots are _hot_ ,” she answered, and then immediately regretted it. She didn't mean to imply that Logan was hot because he was a fighter pilot -- he was hot regardless, and he knew it, and the idea of him as a fighter pilot was about a kajillion times _more_ hot, and she was already sweating in this stupid heat and, God, the the thought of him walking toward her in slow motion with that familiar smirk, wearing a _flight suit_ \-- “Did you talk to him?” she asked, more to distract herself from the weird, vaguely porn-y version of _Top Gun_ running through her head than anything else.

“I did. In fact, we had dinner.”

“You had dinner?” she repeated, incredulous. Rosie walked in a small circle and flopped into a ball beside Veronica's boot. “Like _adults_?” Because up until about two minutes ago, she'd had every confidence that Logan had spent the last several years drinking and whoring and brawling his way through Southern California on his father's money. And while the fighter pilot thing was _crazy_ ridiculous, somehow it was the thought of Logan and Wallace sitting down together -- on _purpose_ \-- to have dinner and catch up on old times that really just cracked her brain open.

“Last time I checked, we're all adults now,” Wallace shot back.

“Well, _you_ are, sure,” Veronica said. “But Logan...” It had never once occurred to her that Logan would grow up. Part of what never worked between them was her nagging suspicion that he _couldn't_ grow up, that the combination of Aaron Echolls' abusive brand of parenting and a ridiculous amount of available money had trapped Logan in some sort of perpetual adolescence. Every time they were on-again, it had been one step forward, and at least one or two steps back. (Though distance had allowed her to realize that her -- she believed, _understandable_ at the time -- tendency to think the worst of him had been as much of a problem.) “I'm just having some trouble picturing all this.”

“You'd be surprised, Veronica,” Wallace answered, and he sounded like he might be kind of irritated with her. “He's not the guy you remember. He's grown up.” 

* * *

Veronica freed Rosie from the leash and peeled her now-damp blouse off as soon as the apartment door closed behind her. “Gross.” Rosie trotted over to the food bowl for a post-walk snack, leaving Veronica to try to assimilate all of this new, insane information herself. 

Her air conditioner worked, in the somewhat looser sense of the word, but these hot, sticky summer days typically required at least one additional shower a day, just to rinse the city off of her. She left the blouse and her pencil skirt in a sad pile in the corner of her bathroom and stepped under the spray. “Too warm,” she admonished, twisting the knob a bit until the water was _almost_ cool. 

“A _fighter pilot_?” she asked the smooth green tiles. “Seriously?”

She turned the possibilities over in her mind. Logan made this huge decision, and _joined the military_ , and then did so well that he became a pilot. It didn't track with anything she thought she knew about him, at least not since before Lilly's death. That Logan -- open, cheerful, sarcastic, sweet Logan -- she could maybe see him making it through boot camp. But _her_ Logan? Damaged, angry, demanding -- but still tender-hearted under all of that -- Logan? 

"I _literally_ can't believe it.” But the tiles were terrible conversationalists. Veronica twisted the knob and grabbed a towel. She dressed quickly, trying to picture Logan flying a fighter plane, but she kept getting stuck on Val Kilmer, and then the shirtless volleyball playing, and she just couldn't imagine it.

Once she was settled in the corner of her couch, wearing shorts and a scandalously thin t-shirt, Veronica pulled out her phone and tapped it absently against her palm. She couldn't stop obsessing about Captain Logan. Or whatever -- she wasn't really familiar with the rankings of Navy pilots.

She shook her head. _NAVY PILOTS_. She needed to talk to someone about this.

Her New York friends knew some of her history from Neptune, though the version she'd told was purely damage control. As it turned out, first year law students looking to beat each other out for the top 10% of the class were at least as vicious as the 09ers. Lisa Sedgewick, a privileged Long Island bitch with a terrible, nasal accent, had unearthed the transcript of what she called _Veronica's chlamydia testimony_ in the Aaron Echolls case. Which had been barrels of fun to reread, but Veronica was almost entirely hardened to the idea of her classmates thinking she was -- in the immortal words of old friend Madison Sinclar -- a total slutbag. It had been _years_ since that kind of crap actually hurt her feelings.

Mostly she was disappointed that every time she thought she had a fresh start, some awful part of her past cropped up -- or, really, was dug up and foisted upon her. The slightly tarnished silver lining this time around was that she realized pretty quickly who she could trust at Columbia, and although she valued their friendship, she'd never unpacked the complicated Logan & Veronica portion of her history to her New York friends. 

She'd always had trouble putting whatever it was between them into words.

And right now, she needed someone who would understand why she couldn't possibly stop herself from obsessing over this information without an hour's worth of background. So she unlocked her phone and texted Mac, _Call me ASAP?_

Moments later, Mac replied, _K, but crazy here, so ASAP = midnightish your time -- ok?_

Dammit. Three and a half hours? _Sure._ She could just be an adult, and read a book or watch TV or do anything other than Google Navy ranks.

Veronica briefly considered calling her dad, but figured he wouldn't really appreciate her musings on the hotness factor of fighter pilots. Though she did attach a particularly cute picture of Rosie to a _just saying hi_ text while she was thinking of him.

Sighing, she scrolled through her contacts, hesitated, and then hit send.

“Seriously, Veronica?” Wallace answered, sounding just as exasperated as when he'd finally ended their earlier call. "We already had this entire conversation.”

“I know! I'm sorry,” she apologized. “But you're the one who broke my brain!”

“I'm not the one who joined the Navy,” Wallace pointed out.

“I know, but--”

“I don't know what else I can tell you.”

Well, she only had about a _million_ questions. She'd moved on, she really had. Years and years of thinking of Logan only occasionally, and mostly with melancholy. What might have been if they'd both grown up a little and all that. And now that she knew he _had_ grown up, now that she was thinking about him again, really thinking about him, she couldn't seem to stop. 

She wanted to know every single detail -- what he looked like now, if his voice still sounded like warm chocolate, where he was stationed, whether he loved flying the same way he loved surfing, what his call sign was, whether he still answered almost everything with sarcasm.

Whether he missed her.

“I'm sorry,” Veronica apologized again, because she really had no right to expect anything from Logan. And it wasn't fair to Wallace to make him obsess right along with her. 

Rosie clambered onto the couch and flopped down, resting her head on Veronica's leg. Veronica pet her absently with her free hand.

“Veronica--”

“No, you're right. We're not the same people we were, and--” She broke off, surprised by the way her voice was shaking. What was wrong with her? 

“Veronica,” Wallace tried again. “All these questions you have?” He sounded like her Wallace again, kind and accommodating, his affection for her audible.

“Yeah?” she managed. She felt off-kilter, unbalanced.

“You should probably ask him directly.” 

Veronica blinked. “Directly?” she echoed. “You mean--?'

“Yes. Call him,” Wallace interrupted. “My God, the two of you both.”

The two of them? Veronica pushed herself upright, and Rosie gave her a mildly irritable look, then shifted closer. “What do you mean?”

“You're dying to ask me if he asked about you, or if he asked for your number,” Wallace answered in a rush. “Just like Logan, sitting through like an _hour_ of catching up on other stuff, dying to ask me about _you_.”

“Does that--?” She stopped. Did Logan ask for her number? And why did she feel like a 16-year-old kid again? “Is he going to call me?” Her voice was high and a little panicky.

Wallace groaned in frustration. “Goddamn, I wish I could knock y'all's heads together.”

Veronica snorted. “Y'all?”

“Seriously, Veronica. You obviously aren't going to just accept this information and move on, so why don't you put all _three_ of us out of our misery and _call him_.”

“I don't have his number,” she pointed out. She already knew what was coming. 

“Yeah,” Wallace answered. “But I do.”

Because apparently they were friends or something now, but the idea that she could just... _call_ Logan. Like calling someone -- calling your _ex-boyfriend_ \-- out of the blue after eight years was perfectly normal.

“Okay,” she answered dumbly.

“Look, it's up to you -- he said to give you his number if you asked for it, but he obviously won't push if you don't want to talk to him,” Wallace explained. “And I'm a guy, Veronica. All of this stuff -- if you need to talk for an hour about whether to call him and what to say and what _shoes_ to wear while you say it, please, God, call Mac.”

She laughed at that. “You really are the best, you know that, Wallace?”

“That's for damn sure,” he answered, a little more emphatically than was necessary. “I'll text you his number, okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, even as her stomach did a slow flip flop. Because she hadn't asked for this mind-blowing information, and she sure as hell hadn't expected to have Logan's phone number dropped on her when she rolled out of bed at the crack of dawn this morning. “Thanks. Really, Wallace. Thanks for putting up with me.”

“Anytime,” he answered, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Now, good _night_.” 

“'Night.” She hung up the phone and stared at it, her hand shaking just a bit. 

Several long moments later, he texted her, and she knew immediately he wasn't angry with her, because instead of just a phone number, Wallace's text said, _Lieutenant, Logan Echolls, USNavy_ before the digits.

She laughed, and texted back, _Fighter pilots!!11!_ just because she knew he would roll his eyes.

 _Ask him about his call sign_ , Wallace answered. _Night, V._

Then she sat there, staring at Logan's number. This was quite an unexpected crossroads she'd found herself evaluating -- let sleeping dogs lie, or cold-call Logan? 

She'd cold-called hundreds of people when she was working as PI, just picked up the phone and dialed with no hesitation, no concern at all over what to say. But she'd always been playing a role, working the angles to get information. This would be just... _her_ calling _him_ , with no real idea how to start any sort of conversation.

“Rosie, should I call him?” 

Rosie looked up at her sleepily, blinked, then leaned her head closer and licked Veronica's arm.

“Okay then,” Veronica told Rosie. “You're very helpful.” 

Eight years, and 3,000 miles away from whatever they'd been to each other. Could she really just call him?

Veronica shifted on the couch, curling up and leaning her head on the armrest. She should probably wait. This kind of decision -- she didn't want to do anything rash. If law school had taught her nothing else, it taught her to examine every possible angle of every decision to avoid unintended consequences. And besides, she really wanted to talk to Mac about her _bad-boy ex-boyfriend the Navy fighter pilot_. God. What even? 

Rosie stood on the couch cushion, circled the opposite way, and flopped back down. 

“Good plan, Rosie,” she murmured as she saved Logan's new phone number to her Contacts. “We should really think about this before we do anything crazy.”

Rosie thumped her tail once, and Veronica chose to take that as a sign of agreement.

END

**Author's Note:**

> STORIES IN THIS UNIVERSE:
> 
>  
> 
> [Directional Stability](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1183780)
> 
>  
> 
> Situational Awareness
> 
>  
> 
> [Angle of Attack](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1305667)


End file.
